Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was music incarnate from earliest childhood. At three he picked out chords on the clavier; at five he composed; at six he toured Europe with his sister, playing for emperors and kings. His father Leopold, a capable musician himself, recognized the prodigy and exploited it, a source of both Mozart's early success and lifelong complications. The child grew into a young man who could write a symphony in a coach, an opera in weeks, a piano concerto while the ink was still drying on the previous page. He settled in Vienna, broke with his father, married against his family's wishes, and struggled constantly with money despite producing more masterpieces than most composers manage in lifetimes twice as long.